A few weeks back, I was upbraided by a longtime reader for using the phrase “usual suspects”. In a Guardian column, I’d explained that those protesting against Benjamin Netanyahu’s overhaul of the Israeli judiciary were not only his perennial opponents on the left, the “usual suspects”, but a full and unexpected spectrum of voices. The reader said he found the phrase disrespectful to those who had been right all along, implicitly according greater esteem to those who were, as he put it, “late to the party”.
I found myself thinking of that exchange when I stood in Parliament Square on Sunday afternoon. Surrounded by a big crowd — organisers say it was 1,200 or more — I saw familiar faces whose fears for the health of Israeli democracy did not begin in January 2023, but years or even decades earlier. But I also saw many for whom this was clearly a first. A few months ago, they would have found the very idea of protesting in London against an Israeli government unthinkable. They seemed to find their own presence there a shock; no one was more surprised by what they were doing than they were.
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Bezalel Smotrich (Flash 90)
You encounter that feeling a lot across Israel and the Jewish world right now, for Netanyahu’s assault on the court system — the same court system currently trying him for corruption — has brought out a vast range of people who are emphatically not the usual suspects.
It’s most visible in Israel itself. Ten weeks in, and the Saturday night protests are only getting bigger, with up to half-a-million Israelis taking to the streets, week after week, to demand a halt to a plan that they believe will remove the only effective check or balance on government power. Among them are not just the opposition parties and their followers, but plenty who are on the right or religiously observant or both — including a good number who identify as supporters of the governing parties. Indeed, polling shows that 60 per cent of Israelis oppose the judicial “reform” legislation that took a further step forward this week, which means roughly one in five of those who voted for Netanyahu or his coalition allies reject their defining policy.
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Noa Tishby (Getty Images)
Each week, another unexpected voice joins the chorus of dissent. Tech entrepreneurs have announced plans to pull out of the country, taking their vital tax revenues with them. This capital flight comes alongside a fall in the value of the Israeli currency and a warning from the Moody’s credit ratings agency that any further sign of “weakening institutions” will jeopardise the country’s current A1 profile.
Not for nothing did the Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahnemann tell me and Yonit Levi on our Unholy podcast that he regarded the judicial reforms as “the worst threat to Israel” in its 75 years, worse even than the Yom Kippur war. A few weeks later, it was the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, telling Unholy that, if the judicial reforms go through, Israel would not be a democracy but a “dictatorship”.
And then came the reserve fighter pilots, the IDF’s elite of the elite. Thirty-seven out of 40 members of 69 Squadron told their commanders they would not report for training, focusing instead on working “for the sake of democracy”.
But if Netanyahu’s government is galvanising opposition in unexpected quarters inside Israel, the convulsions through the diaspora are scarcely less dramatic. In the US, even AIPAC — which habitually sees critics of Israel as enemies — couldn’t ignore the settler violence in the West Bank town of Huwara, violence the IDF commander on the ground branded a “pogrom”. AIPAC announced that it would not meet Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, when he visited Washington, after Smotrich said that Huwara should be “wiped out”. Meanwhile, Abe Foxman and Alan Dershowitz have denounced the Netanyahu legal reforms — “If I were in Israel I would be joining the protests,” said Dershowitz — and so, even more incredibly, has Miriam Adelson, widow of the Trump-supporting rightist donor, Sheldon Adelson, along with the hasbarista Noa Tishby.
You can see the same picture in our own community. The UJIA said last week that it is “profoundly concerned” by plans that would “weaken the independence of Israel’s judiciary”. In the same week, the chair of the Jewish Leadership Council wrote that “Israel’s democracy is in peril”, as he decried the rise of “nationalism, fundamentalism and racism” in the country.
Which is why I couldn’t help but baulk at the words of my colleague on these pages, Stephen Pollard, when he wrote last week that he was going to stay away from Sunday’s demo because it was supported by the New Israel Fund and Yachad, groups the headline identified as “the Jewish hard left”. Anyone who knows either organisation knows that that label is absurd — and not only because the actual Jewish hard left would be nowhere near a protest where the demonstrators waved the Israeli flag, chanted Hebrew slogans and sang the songs of Israel.
Instead, the NIF and Yachad are the people who saw the danger early, who have long warned of the threat to Israeli democracy and who have been utterly vindicated by events. They don’t deserve opprobrium; they deserve admiration for their prescience.
For their view has now, belatedly, been embraced by swathes of the Jewish world: the view that it is not anti-Israel, but emphatically pro-Israel to criticise bad governments and fight for Israel’s democracy, incomplete and imperfect though it is. They saw exactly where occupation and ultra-nationalism would lead, and they have turned out to be right. Their cardinal principle — that sometimes the truest friend is the candid one — has now become utterly mainstream.
I don’t know whether the pilots and the protestors, the people on the streets in Tel Aviv, New York and London will succeed. Maybe whatever concessions can be extracted from Netanyahu won’t be enough. But I do know this: the landscape of the Jewish world has changed dramatically. It is the defenders of this appalling Israeli government who are on the fringes now. The “usual suspects” were never on the hard left — they were out in front.
